Margins for cloud are not like ads, but yeah, it exists and is a huge part of Google now :)
I can bet AWS and Azure will be in business in 10 years. Wanna bet on whether GC will be in business (and not sold to pieces by Google) in 10 years?
Absolutely will be in business. The structural advantage and trajectory is tremendous. It is treated like an enterprise organization and ran very different from traditional Google business. Products are supported and customers have significant influence in the business. (Disclaimer: I work in the Cloud @ Google).
I think they will be in business, but don't pretend products will be supported. Wouldn't surprise me if Datastore / App Engine go away in the future. The number of APIs I have had to migrate over the past 5 years using GCP is shameful:
- could no longer do code deploys on internal WebApps that were on old Python 2/3 images. Had to stick with that revision until we migrated to newer versions.
- had to migrate to a newer firebase messaging API recently - search features mostly killed on GCP, which is ironic. I guess we're supposed to build our own search or use a 3rd party? Postgres/Spanner full text search it is then.
Looking forward to having to migrate my gen1 cloud functions too! Keeps me employed I suppose.